“Little lumps of lead in copper jackets were crisscrossing the woods under the shellbursts, zipping along much faster than sound.”

“Artists use frauds to make human beings seem more wonderful than they really are. Dancers show us human beings who move much more gracefully than human beings really move. Films and books and plays show us people talking much more entertainingly than people really talk, make paltry human enterprises seem important. Singers and musicians show us human beings making sounds far more lovely than human beings really make. Architects give us temples in which something marvelous is obviously going on. Actually, practically nothing is going on.”

“A lot of people were opposed to it. A lot of people were for it. I myself think about it as little as possible.”

“The little girls were wearing black party dresses and black party shoes, so strangers would know at once how nice they were. ”

“Trout sat back and thought about the conversation. He shaped it into a story, which he never got around to writing until he was an old, old man. It was about a planet where the language kept turning into pure music, because the creatures there were so enchanted by sounds. Words became musical notes. Sentences became melodies. They were useless as conveyors of information, because nobody knew or cares what the meanings of words were anymore. So leaders in government and commerce, in order to function, had to invent new and much uglier vocabularies and sentence structures all the time, which would resist being transmuted to music.”

“Enjoy the little things in life because one day you`ll look back and realize they were the big things.”

“Colds and babies were both caused by germs which loved nothing so much as a mucous membrane.”